Tag: product ownership

Even with the formalization of Agile practices into numerous frameworks and methodologies, I have to say not much has changed for the software developer or engineer with respect to how they get work done. I’m not referring to technology. The changes in what software developers and engineers use to get work done has been seismic. The biggest shift in the “how,” in my experience, is that what were once underground practices are now openly accepted and encouraged.

When I was coding full time, in the pre-Agile days and under the burden of CMM, we followed all the practices for documenting use cases, hammering out technical and functional specs, and laboriously talking through requirements. (I smile when I hear developers today complain about the burden of meetings under Scrum.) And when it came time to actually code, I and my fellow developers set the multiple binders of documentation aside and engaged in many then unnamed Agile practices. We mixed and matched use cases in a way that allowed for more efficient coding of larger functional components. We “huddled” each morning in the passage way to cube pods to discuss dependencies and brainstorm solutions to technical challenges. Each of these became more efficiently organized in Agile as backlog refinement and daily stand-ups. We had numerous other loose practices that were not described in tomes such as CMM.

But Agile delivery teams today are frequently composed of more than just technical functional domains. There may be non-technical expertise included as integral members of the team. Learning strategists, content editors, creative illustrators, and marketing experts may be part of the team, depending on the objectives of the project. Consequently, this represents a significant challenge to technical members of the team (i.e. software development and tech QA) who are unused to working with non-technical team members. Twenty years ago a developer who might say “Leave me alone so I can code.” would have been viewed as a dedicated worker. Today, it’s a sign that the developer risks working in isolation and consequently delivering something that is mis-matched with the work being done by the rest of the team.

On an Agile delivery team, whether composed of a diverse set of functional domains or exclusively technical experts, individual team members need to be thinking of the larger picture and the impact of their work on that of their team mates and the overall work flow. They need to be much more attentive to market influences than in the past. The half-life of major versions, let along entire products, is such that most software products outside a special niche can’t survive without leveraging Agile principles and practices. Their knowledge must expand beyond just their functional domain. The extent to which they possess this knowledge is reflected in the day-to-day behaviors displayed by the team and it’s individuals.

Is everyone on the team sensitive and respectful of everyone else’s time? This means following through on commitments and promises, including agreed upon meeting start times. One person showing up five minutes late to a 15 minute stand-up has just missed out on a third of the meeting at least. If the team waits for everyone to show up before starting, the late individual has just squandered 5 minutes multiplied by the number of team mates. For a 6 member team, that’s a half hour. And if it happens every day, that’s 2.5 hours a week. It adds up quickly. Habitual late-comers are also signaling a lack of respect to other team members. They are implicitly saying “Me and my time is more important than anyone else on the team.” Unchecked, this quickly spills over into other areas of the team’s interactions. Enforcing an on-time rule like this is key to encouraging the personal discipline necessary to work effectively as a team. When a scrum master keeps the team in line with a few basic items like this, the larger discipline issues never seem to arise. As U.S. Army General Ann Dunwoody (ret.) succinctly points out in her book, never walk by a mistake. Doing so gives implicit acceptance for the transgression. Problems blossom from there, and it isn’t a pretty flower. (As a scrum master, I cannot “make” someone show up on time. But I can address the respect aspect of this issue by always starting on time. That way, late-comers stand out as late, not more important. Over time, this tends to correct the lateness issue as well.)

Everyone on the team must be capable of tracking a constantly evolving set of dependencies and knowing where their work fits within the flow. To whom will they be delivering work? From whom are they expecting completed work? The answer to these questions may not be a name on the immediate team. Scrum masters must periodically explicitly ask these questions if the connections aren’t coming out naturally during stand-ups. Developing this behavior is about coaching the team to look beyond the work on their desk and understand how they are connected to the larger effort. Software programmers seem to have a natural tendency to build walls around their work. Software engineers less so. And on teams with diverse functional groups it is important for both the scrum master and product owner to be watchful for when barriers appear for reasons that have more to due to lack of familiarity across functional domains than anything else.

Is the entire team actively and consistently engaged with identifying and writing stories?

Is the team capable and willing to cross domain boundaries and help? Are they interested in learning about other parts of the product and business?

Product owners and scrum masters need to be constantly scanning for these and other signs of disengagement as well as opportunities to connect cross functional needs.

When someone owns something they tend to keep a closer watch on where that something is and whether or not it’s in good working order. Owners are more sensitive to actions that may adversely affect the value of their investment. It’s the car you own vs the car you rent. This holds true for products, projects, and teams. For this reason the title of “product owner” is well suited to the responsibilities assigned to the role. The explicit call-out to ownership carries a lot of goodness related to responsibility, leadership, and action.

Having been a product owner and having coached product owners, I have a deep respect for anyone who takes on the challenges associated with this role. In my view, it’s the most difficult position to fill on an Agile team. For starters, there are all the things a product owner is responsible for as described in any decent book on scrum: setting the product vision and road map, ordering the product backlog, creating epics and story cards, defining acceptance criteria, etc. What’s often missing from the standard set of bullet items is the “how” for doing them well. Newly minted product owners are usually left to their own devices for figuring this out. And unfortunately, in this short post I won’t be offering any how-to guidance for developing any of the skills generally recognized to be part of the product owner role.

What I’d most like to achieve in this post is calling out several of the key skills associated with quality product ownership that are usually omitted from the books and trainings – the beyond-the-basics items that any product owner will want to include in their continuous learning journey with Agile. In no particular order…

Product owners must be superb negotiators when working with stakeholders and team members. The techniques used for each group are different so it’s important to understand the motivations that drive them. I’ve found Jim Camp’s “Start with No” and Chris Voss’ “Never Split the Difference” to be particularly helpful in this regard.

One of the four values stated in the Agile Manifesto is “Responding to change over following a plan.” Unfortunately, this is often construed to mean any change at any time is valuable. This Agile value isn’t a directive for maximum entropy and chaos. Product owners must remain vigilant to scope changes. And the boundaries for scope are defined by the decisions product owners make. So product owners must be decisive and committed to the decisions, agreements, and promises that have been made with stakeholders and the team.

Product owners need to have a good sense for when experimentation may be needed to sort out any complex or risky features in the project – creating spikes or proof-of-concept work early enough in the project so as to avoid any costly pivots later in the project.

Even with experimentation, making the call to pivot will require a product owner’s clear understanding of past events and any path forward that offers the greatest chance for success. As the sage says, predictions are difficult to make, particularly about the future. The expectation isn’t for clairvoyance, rather for the ability to pay close attention to what the (non-vanity) data are telling them.

Understanding how to work through failures and dealing with “The Dip,” as Seth Godin calls it, are also important skills for a product owner. The team and the stakeholders are going to look to the product owner’s leadership to demonstrate confidence that they are on the right track.

More than other roles on an Agile team, the product owner must be a truly well-rounded and experienced individual. Paradoxically, it is a role that is both constrained by the highly visible nature of the position and dynamic due to the skill set required to maximize the chances for project success.

Estimating levels of effort for a set of tasks by a group of individuals well qualified to complete those tasks can efficiently and reliable be determined with a collaborative estimation process like planning poker. Such teams have a good measure of skill overlap. In the context of the problem set, each of the team members are generalist in the sense it’s possible for any one team member to work on a variety of cross functional tasks during a sprint. Differences in preferred coding language among team members, for example, is less an issue when everyone understands advanced coding practices and the underlying architecture for the solution.

With a set of complimentary technical skills it’s is easier agree on work estimates. There are other benefits that flow from well-matched teams. A stable sprint velocity emerges much sooner. There is greater cross functional participation. And re-balancing the work load when “disruptors” occur – like vacations, illness, uncommon feature requests, etc. – is easier to coordinate.

Once the set of tasks starts to include items that fall outside the expertise of the group and the group begins to include cross functional team members, a process like planning poker becomes increasingly less reliable. The issue is the mismatch between relative scales of expertise. A content editor is likely to have very little insight into the effort required to modify a production database schema. Their estimation may be little more than a guess based on what they think it “should” be. Similarly for a coder faced with estimating the effort needed to translate 5,000 words of text from English to Latvian. Unless, of course, you have an English speaking coder on your team who speaks fluent Latvian.

These distinctions are easy to spot in project work. When knowledge and solution domains have a great deal of overlap, generalization allows for a lot of high quality collaboration. However, when an Agile team is formed to solve problems that do not have a purely technical solution, specialization rather than generalization has a greater influence on overall success. The risk is that with very little overlap specialized team expertise can result in either shallow solutions or wasteful speculation – waste that isn’t discovered until much later. Moreover, re-balancing the team becomes problematic and most often results in delays and missed commitments due to the limited ability for cross functional participation among team mates.

The challenge for teams where knowledge and solution domains have minimal overlap is to manage the specialized expertise domains in a way that is optimally useful, That is, reliable, predictable, and actionable. Success becomes increasingly dependent on how good an organization is at estimating levels of effort when the team is composed of specialists.

One approach I experimented with was to add a second dimension to the estimation: a weight factor to the estimator’s level of expertise relative to the nature of the card being considered. The idea is that with a weighted expertise factor calibrated to the problem and solution contexts, a more reliable velocity emerges over time. In practice, was difficult to implement. Teams spent valuable time challenging what the weighted factor should be and less experienced team members felt their opinion had been, quite literally, discounted.

The approach I’ve had the most success with on teams with diverse expertise is to have story cards sized by the individual assigned to complete the work. This still happens in a collaborative refinement or planning session so that other team members can contribute information that is often outside the perspective of the work assignee. Dependencies, past experience with similar work on other projects, missing acceptance criteria, or a refinement to the story card’s minimum viable product (MVP) definition are all examples of the kind of information team members have contributed. This invariably results in an adjustment to the overall level of effort estimate on the story card. It also has made details about the story card more explicit to the team in a way that a conversation focused on story point values doesn’t seem to achieve. The conversation shifts from “What are the points?” to “What’s the work needed to complete this story card?”

I’ve also observed that by focusing ownership of the estimate on the work assignee, accountability and transparency tend to increase. Potential blockers are surfaced sooner and team members communicate issues and dependencies more freely with each other. Of course, this isn’t always the case and in a future post we’ll explore aspects of team composition and dynamics that facilitate or prevent quality collaboration.

Parkinson observed and illustrated that a committee whose job was to approve plans for a nuclear power plant spent the majority of its time on discussions about relatively trivial and unimportant but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bike-shed, while neglecting the non-trivial proposed design of the nuclear power plant itself, which is far more important but also a far more difficult and complex task to criticise constructively.

I see this phenomenon in play during team story sizing exercises in the following scenarios.

In the context of the story being sized, the relative expertise of each of the team members is close to equal in terms of experience and depth of knowledge. The assumption is that if everyone on the team is equally qualified to estimate the effort and complexity of a particular story then the estimation process should move along quickly. With a skilled team, this does, indeed, occur. If it is a newly formed team or if the team is new to agile principles and practices, Parkinson’s Law of Triviality can come into play as the effort quickly gets lost in the weeds.

In the context of the story being sized, the relative expertise of the team members is not near parity and yet each of the individual team members has a great deal of expertise in the context of their respective functional areas. What I’ve observed happening is that the team members least qualified to evaluate the particular story feel the need to assert their expertise and express an opinion. I recall an instance where a software developer estimated it would take 8 hours of coding work to place a “Print This” button on a particular screen. The credentialed learning strategist (who asked for the print button and has no coding experience) seemed incredulous that such an effort would require so much time. A lengthy and unproductive argument ensued.

To prevent this I focus my coaching efforts primarily on the product owner as they will be interacting with the team on this effort during product backlog refinement session more frequently than I. They need to watch for:

Strong emotional response by team members when a size or time estimate is proposed.

Conversations that drop further and further into design details.

Conversations that begin to explore multiple “what if” scenarios.

The point isn’t to prevent each of these behaviors from occurring. Rather manage them. If there is a strong emotional response, quickly get to the “why” behind that response. Does the team member have a legitimate objection or does their response lack foundation?

Every team meeting is an opportunity to clarify the bigger picture for the team so a little bit of conversation around design and risks is a good thing. It’s important to time box those conversations and agree to take the conversation off-line from the backlog refinement session.

When coaching the team, I focus primarily on the skills needed to effectively size an effort. Within this context I can also address the issue of relative expertise and how to leverage and value the opinions expressed by team member who may not entirely understand the skill needed to complete a particular story.

(John Cook cites another interesting example of Parkinson’s Law of Triviality (a.k.a. the bike shed principle) from Michael Beirut’s book How to involving the design of several logos.)

Adverse surprises during a team driven project are about as welcome as whooping cough at a glassblowers convention. Minimizing the opportunity for surprises comes down to how well expectations are defined at the very beginning and how well they are managed during the course of the project. Unidentified expectations are like landmines in the project path. When they explode, it’s bad and the course of the project WILL change. Product owners can’t elucidate all the expectations a stakeholder may have, but with experience they can define the major ones. With practice and attention, experienced product owners can tease out all but the minor expectations that are often dependant on discovery within the project’s sprints.

Key to this skill is knowing the questions to ask at the beginning. In my experience, stakeholders rarely deliberately hold back their expectations. They just don’t know what they don’t know and it is the product owner’s responsibility to establish clarity around expectations. Intuitively obvious expectations rarely play out as such.

A few questions for stakeholders that I’ve found helpful:

What business problems do you intend to solve with this project?

What do you need to see to know the project is progressing?

What will you see when the project is done?

What is your availability commitment for the duration of the project?

How often to you expect to meet to review progress?

How long do YOU think it will take to complete the project?

To what extent are your functional groups integrated?

Describe your process from design to development to implementation?

Are there other stakeholders we need to know about and include?

What factors have helped and hurt success with past projects?

This is by no means an exhaustive list of questions. And they may even seem obvious. The answers, however, are almost never obvious.

I also find it effective to challenge stakeholders with scenarios.

What happens if we discover this project will take two months longer than expected?

What happens if we discover a desired solution is technically unfeasible?

How will you support us if we encounter significant delays from client deliverables?

Product owners need to keep pursuing clarity around expectations until they are satisfied they have a good understanding of how the people side of the project will unfold. This will go a long way to helping the development team handle the technical side of the project.

While stakeholders answer these questions, product owners need to pay attention not just the words stakeholders use, but how they answer as well. They need to be scanning for underlying assumptions that drive the answers. These often reflect relevant cultural drivers which can signal significant expectations seemingly unrelated to the project at hand.

For example, perhaps the product owner has established the expectation of a three business day turnaround for feedback from the stakeholder when asked to review periodic project deliverables. “We can complete our reviews within three business days and work to get them to you as fast as possible,” says the stakeholder somewhat hesitantly as he looks off into the distance. Where the pain begins is when the inattentive product owner discovers that, while the feedback may be ready, the client organization has a thick layer of compliance and the feedback is hung up in legal for an additional one to two weeks…every time. If the stakeholder’s responses reflect something less than 100% commitment, keep asking questions designed to surface underlying assumptions.

As each sprint concludes, and eventually the project as well, the savvy product owner knows their work with expectations isn’t complete. Retrospectives for each sprint, each release, and the project conclusion should make note of the expectations that were missed and consider questions that could have been asked that would have helped surface the surprise expectations sooner.

This is also an excellent time to consider if any of the existing expectations have changed or if it appears there may be new expectations emerging. Internal forces, such as changes in team composition, and external forces, such as shifting market demands, can significantly impact the set of expectations a product owner is tasked with managing.

If you expected to read these kinds of things about surfacing stakeholder expectations, then you’re probably an experienced product owner.